34 like spies. But by a miracle she was able to push the door back and stand against it, and that night the coat was buried in the garden. Confusion, panic, all sorts of decisions to be made-'lnd a little girl crying upstairs. The maids were no use at all. They put their aprons uver their heads and wept with- ou t ceasing vVe would have to leave, It secl11ed. But then what to take "Just this book," George would plead, and a pair of shoes would be dumped out to lllake room. The boxes of notes could not go; the} were packed in to a small metal trunk, which my English grandfather had used in India, and this was buried, late one night, in the garden. At last, the days of waiting for travel permits were over, the <;uitcases were strapped on to the car- riage, and the little caravan set out for the border, meeting the advancing Ger- man armies; my father and mother watched them pour down through the standing grain like lead. There had been hardly time to take a last look at the gar- den, at the beloved house lying ther so airy and sunny and quiet in its orchard green. D'id my mother look back one last time at the long, protecting wal1 that had sheltered all she. loved for such a very brief tillle? At the greelt oaks standing inviolate, their leaves shining in the sun r I remember none of this. It still ounds like a fairy tale, a fairy tale that cifter all, after many tribulations, ended well, since no one died, and it came ful1 circle at last in another deep-green gal den, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, many, many years later. M y memories of the house at vV 011- delgem begin and end on one day in 1 91 9. This day stays with me like some marvellous, strange drean1 when you are allowed to go back in time but everything is curiously distorted. I was seven and we were gOIng to Europe for the first time SInce the war. Until then, Belgium had meant to me the postman f hurrying up the path t this was a year earlier) saying "Mrs. Sarton! Mrs. Sarton !" and handing her those first letters with Belgian stamps after four years of silence, and my mother sitting down, tears streaming down her cheeks, unable for a moment to read, yet know- ing at last that they were alIve-the friends who had been imprisoned behind the wall of suffering while we, the earliest and most cherIshed of refugees, <;lowly found ourselves and our new life in Cambridge. Now we were on our way to Won- delgem How did we get there unce we reached G hen t? By trolley? By carriage r LIke a dream, this jour- ney has no beginning We are there, at the gate. The first thing we see, even before we go in, is the once barren plum tree laden with huge blue plums. I can feel all through me my ll10ther's beating heart. \,Ve push open the gatt' an d are in Sleeping Beauty's garden. It ; all so still, <;0 lush, so overgrown that we have to tear a path through tall yellow flowers to reach the house, but the house "tands. It is there, waiting-somehow proudly, in spite of two bomb holes in the roof and the jungle of green all -lround. Everything feels ripe and breathless. It is very hot. Fruit every- where; cherries, peaches, plums (have [ invented this?) look like fruit in a dream. One hardly dares to touch it, for it may not be real. .i\nd I am noth- ing, an observer-nothing but e} es. [t is IllY father's and mother's mOlllent, the long, poignant look back into th lost past. InsIde, we al e met by destruction- chairs hroken up for firewood, rub- bish knee-deep in the COI ners, utter desecration. Between these patient walls, armies had flowed back and forth, making do with what they found, and if it was a fourteenth-century chair, later looters would break it up if they I efrained. At first, my mother and father must have only felt their life to- gether violated, trampled down, 111ade ugly and filthy in every possible wa}. The dream, so beautiful and mystenous whIle we stood outside, had turned into a nightmare. I opened a cupboard and saw on the floor what looked like a pile of large cannon balls made of ll1ud. vVhat were they? I do not know, even now, but I have never forgotten th eln. But just then lllY l110ther cried out, "Look, George!" She lifted out of a pile of rubbish a single V enc tian glass on a long, delicate stem, so di rty it looked opaque, yet intact. How had this single fragile object survived? It seemed like a miracle and gave us COUI age. The drealTI fades out into a story- perhaps a legend. It seems that two Ger- 111an officers lived in the house during the first two years of the war, that they to]e a girl from the village to work n lñ n ,n for them. Somèone held c1 glitllpse of her through the curtains of the closed carrielge that bore her to \V on del- gem-but that is aU. She wa<; never seen agaIn. The officers had tinl( to OCCUP) themselves with l110re than ll1ilitary mat- ters, apparently, for they 11111st hd-ve sent h0111e of sold all the Gern1eln books on thL history of 111athematics and physics. 'ly father is taking down what few books are left-moldy, dusty books- and opening them at random, to dis- cover that they, too, have been violated. The officers had amused themselves h} ripping out an end paper here, an il- lustration there, untIl the} had gone through the library, sparing not a single volume-a methodical, not very amus- ing game, one would think But no doubt they were hored. I was beginning to feel that we were ghosts, entirely unreal, that only the rubbish and desolation were real, when we heard someone tearing through the flowers. One of our peasant neighbors stood shyly at the door. She was smil- ing broadly, holding out to my mother a pile of beautiful old plates. ("But where? But how?" my l110ther ex- claimed. ) All those years, she had stored them up, one by one, as the officers paid for eggs and butter with some object from the house Never knowing if we would come back, she had saved the plates. She hd-d hoped; she had foreseen the happiness she might one day have in her hands to gIve. Only then, wIth the plates, so clean, so brilliant, so un- touched, so wrapped in human kind- ness, in her own hands, did IllY lllother weep. Later, I l11USt have been told about the notes for my father's hook; it does not seem to be part of that day. A distant cousin of ours had succeeded in digging them up, safe in the metal trunk, and